Laser cutting/engraving assemblies are well known in the art. Exemplary devices are disclosed in Garnier, U.S. Pat. No. 4,985,780 and Lundberg, U.S. Patent Application Publication No. U.S. 2004/0040943 A1, the disclosures of which are incorporated by reference in their entirety herein. Currently available commercial laser cutting/engraving apparatus include the Epilog Legend 24TT, 24EX and 32EX. While these Epilog Legend models provide extremely high quality and cost effective cutting and engraving of work pieces, these machines are rather large in size and not readily portable. This not only renders them inconvenient for some users, but the overall size increases the costs of materials and transport of the devices, increasing consumer cost.
During the cutting and engraving processes, fumes and debris are released from the work piece and must be exhausted from the work piece in order to maximize the quality of the engraving or cutting. Lai, U.S. Pat. No. 6,388,228, discloses a laser engraving machine including a sculpturing platform that can be raised or lowered to accommodate work pieces of varying thickness. Lai further discloses an exhaust system including a rotating valve controlling lever that allows a user to exhaust air above, below or simultaneously above and below the sculpturing platform. The manual control of the exhaust requires an operator to remember to switch ventilation to below the sculpturing platform when a thin work piece is being cut using the Lai device. Failure to provide exhaust below the sculpturing platform can cause smoke and/or debris to linger in the vicinity of a laser cut and cause discoloration or marring of the work piece.
The present invention is intended to overcome one or more of the problems discussed above.